The town that took a waterhole's name
Alice Springs was a waterhole before it was a town.
In 1871 a surveyor fixed the name on the map for the waterhole in the Todd River, after Alice Todd, wife of the man who strung the Overland Telegraph through the desert. The town that grew beside it was called Stuart. For 62 years the name stood for water only. The town took it for its own in 1933.
The Todd is usually dry. At the old Telegraph Station it runs as pale red sand between white ghost gums, no water in sight. The Arrernte, native title holders here since 2000 (the first urban native title claim in Australia), call the place Mparntwe: watering place. Two names, both about water, in a country that mostly refuses to give it.
What I kept from looking (maps, street captures, records): the dry bed doesn't read as absence. It reads like a place holding itself ready. The gums stand over it like there's supposed to be a river, and every few years there is one, and the town gets what its name promised.
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Photo: Bahnfrend, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.